Sunday, September 06, 2009

The Evolution of God

Robert Wright's new book The Evolution of God sounds like an interesting read, although I can't help but be reminded of this passage from G.K. Chesterton's Everlasting Man:

One of my first journalistic adventures, or misadventures, concerned a comment on Grant Allen, who had written a book about the Evolution of the Idea of God. I happened to remark that it would be much more interesting if God wrote a book about the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen. And I remember that the editor objected to my remark on the ground that it was blasphemous; which naturally amused me not a little. For the joke of it was, of course, that it never occurred to him to notice the title of the book itself, which really was blasphemous; for it was, when translated into English, 'I will show you how this nonsensical notion that there is God grew up among men.' * * *

The editor had not seen the point, because in the title of the book the long word came at the beginning and the short word at the end; whereas in my comments the short word came at the beginning and gave him a sort of shock. I have noticed that if you put a word like God into the same sentence with a word like dog, these abrupt and angular words affect people like pistol-shots. Whether you say that God made the dog or the dog made God does not seem to matter; that is only one of the sterile disputations of the too subtle theologians. But so long as you begin with a long word like evolution the rest will roll harmlessly past; very probably the editor had not read the whole of the title, for it is rather a long title and he was rather a busy man.

2 Comments:

The excerpt from Chapter 20 ("Well, aren't we special") makes the book sound pretty dumb, actually.

(For example, that the author thinks that there's clearly been a moral progression in history is so fraught with assuming his conclusion -- alternatively, with assuming a really stupid moral code as the zenith of moral development -- makes whatever reasoning was used in the rest of the book seem unlikely to be of quality.)